The Religious Services Ministry, which has oversight for marriage in Israel,
issued a statement on Monday claiming that statistics released on the same day
disproved the claims of marriage reform advocates, such as the
national-religious Tzohar organization, that significant numbers of Jewish
couples are getting civil marriages abroad instead of marrying according to
Jewish law.
The Central Bureau of Statistics figures showed that 9,262
marriages that took place abroad were reported to the Interior Ministry in
2010.
Some 1,533 of those marriages were of couples in which both spouses
were Jewish. 797 of those couples, totaling 52 percent of the marriages, were
conducted in Cyprus or the Czech Republic, representing 2.2% of the total number
of Jewish marriages conducted in 2010.
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